I focus almost exclusively on PvP, whether solo, small gang, or large bloc warfare. In the past, I've been a miner, mission runner, and faction warfare jockey. I'm particularly interested in helping high-sec players get into 0.0 combat.

Friday, January 29, 2016

Mike Azariah put out an article today offering an opinion on
why players
should care about and vote for the CSM. In it, he spends a little time talking
about some disagreements on the purpose of the CSM according to the CSM white
paper. He also makes a parallel between voting for the CSM and voting for
politicians in the real world.

Now, I swore I wasn’t going to make a post about the CSM
this year. At first, I used to be all-in with the importance of the CSM. Now,
my attitude is very much, “Who really cares?”

And I am provide some context behind that. Mike makes two
popular arguments that are, at their core, deeply flawed approaches to the CSM.
So popular, in fact, that even CSM candidates seem to misunderstand what the
CSM is.

And I’m going to make some parallels with my own career in
marketing, as well.

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

On this blog, I’ve written many times about the search for
the good fight. In the real world, that same sentiment is shared by the
dramatic character of the wandering warrior, searching for a beautiful death in
service of a great cause. Whether this archetype is legit or not in the real
world is up for debate. But in Eve – with our immortal capsuleers – it’s very
much a thing.

At its core, what it means is that you wander through New
Eden looking for that perfect fight in which you experience artful PvP. Win or
lose isn’t the point; what you’re searching for is the opportunity to be part
of true skill, and excellence of action.

It’s actually quite rare to witness the pure thing. Though,
you can get diluted glimpses of it – the Vexor pilot who stayed to defend his
mining friend I wrote about, for instance. The pure execution of a well-laid
plan flawlessly enacted with exactly the minimum force and perfect situational
awareness the opportunity requires… that perfect balance of necessity and power
that results in an artful attack stays with you.

I experienced it last night, with an added twist because it
involved a reader of mine, someone I’ve watched grow in ability for several
months now.

Sunday, January 24, 2016

Just like riding a bicycle, the best way to recover from a
ship loss is to get right back out there and try again. In my case, after losing the Fortuna, I woke up in Venal and
immediately jumped into a Heretic.

I always fly with a 603 CPU implant to squeeze a little
extra out of my fittings. I maxed my fitting skills a long time ago, but that
little bit can mean the difference between an ideal fit and having to make
compromises in a surprising number of cases.
But having been caught by the hictor, my implant was gone. I had to offline the web on my Heretic to
undock.

Making my way back to empire space to buy a new implant, I
quickly headed down the Tribute pipe leading to Taisy. All systems were clear
except for E-OGL4, which had five reds.
I decided to – wisely as it turned out – warp to a perch on the M-OEE8
gate and saw a Sabre, Svipul, and Oracle running a gate camp. The Svipul and Sabre were right on the gate
with a bubble up, and the Oracle was about a hundred kilometers away.

Saturday, January 23, 2016

Today at 5:25 am Eve time, the Stratios-class ship Fortuna was finally – after a reign of
terror lasting three weeks – destroyed by a hotdrop by members of Theta Squad,
primarily from Goonswarm.

Upon its death, the Fortuna had generated 19 killmarks,
delivered 24 final blows, participated in 48 kills, and 16 solo kills (once
rats were taken off). Those kills represented a total of 7.2 billion isk of
damage.

More importantly, it represented more than three weeks
behind enemy lines, dodging response gangs, fighting outnumbered, and choosing
the right time to strike.

I originally came down to Fade from Venal with that ship,
intending to reship into a dictor once I lost it. At the time, I thought I’d be
reshipping within the week. But instead,
I had a great run of good luck, leading me to actually name it – something I’ve
never done before – the Fortuna.

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Two days ago, CCP announced that they would be proceeding
with implementing
skill trading with the February 9 patch. Through this process, players can purchase a
skill extractor for aurum (or, more likely, off the market, because very few
people actually deal in aurum), which they can use to suck sp out of their
characters and sell on the market. This is an entirely new feature that has not
previously existed.

Cue the paranoia, screaming fits, doom crows crying “Eve is
dying”, and threats of unsubbing from every quarter.

The truth is that skill trading offers a lot of
opportunities, particularly for younger players.

It’s important to keep in mind that every skillpoint that
enters an injector came from a character training it normally. That sp represents the result of a certain
interval of subscription time being transferred to another character. But when that sp is transferred to another character,
it’s not a perfect transfer. If a
character with more than 5 million sp injected it, some sp is lost – at least
20% and as much as 70%. For those characters
– the majority – every time an injector is used, sp leaves the game forever. The
importance of that can’t be overstated. In a game that suffers from an
abundance of sp and mature characters with nothing left to train, skill trading
is a means of mitigating that sp creep.

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Okay, okay, puns aside… recently, TISHU has been spending a
lot of time in Fade camping SMA systems and providing a Darwinian service to
Space Monkey Alliance, one of the CFC alliances.

The official reason the alliance is doing this is because of
a contract. I’ve been highly engaged with this campaign. I came down in a Stratios from a secondary
base I have up in Venal, with the intention of reshipping into something more
appropriate and aligned with the corp doctrines and kinds of fights they were
hoping to get. That was on January first, and I’m still going strong with that
little Strat that could. In fact, I’ve seen a few more Strats in fleet. It’s a
versatile ship, and once I finally die I’ll probably share that fit I’ve been
so successful with.

And successful, it has been. I’ve racked up 43 kills since I
deployed to Fade, with no losses (I did lose Vexor in Syndicate to a gate camp,
but that was beforehand). Nearly all of those kills were with less than 10
pilots on the mail, and fifteen were solo. It’s been a good time, and I’ve been
dedicated exclusively to the effort.

Why am I so engaged with this campaign? On a personal level, it aligns with my own
thoughts recently. The whole purpose of this blog is to encourage players to
learn to PvP – not to achieve some meaningless metric, but to appreciate the
challenge of competing against another human, and in so doing to improve
yourself.

Friday, January 15, 2016

A lot of things can be frustrating about this game. You’ve
got your minor setbacks and challenging activities that delay your
gratification. Then you have your ship losses and market errors that represent
significant amounts of time wasted, lost, or otherwise flushed down the drain.
Then there are the bugs and critical faults that can cause the game to be
literally unplayable (in the un-ironic sense).

But those aren’t the “most” frustrating thing about Eve. No,
not by a long-shot.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Despite what you may think, even the most verbose person has
a hard time producing material on a regular interval. Everyone can write one or
two coherent pieces; the challenge is in forming your thoughts consistently,
both during boom times and droughts.

A lot of magazines and newspapers expect a writer to produce
a piece every month for feature columns. For feature articles, it can sometimes
be every couple months. TheMittani.com expects writers to produce every two
weeks. That’s a robust and difficult
schedule to maintain, and it quickly separates dedicated writers from casuals.

Now, try writing 1500-2000 words every two or three days
(and for some of my posts, that’s a bit on the conservative side!). I’ve tried very hard not to include too many
“filler” posts – I want readers to be able to leave with some piece of
knowledge they might not have had before visiting. I can count perhaps a
handful of posts that haven’t had this goal. No one’s perfect!

Writing a blog about a hobby – in particular – is a
surprisingly demanding and difficult thing, because the same itch that makes me
log in and play is what fuels my writing. That chunk of time dedicated to Eve
gets split a couple ways. It’s a balancing act; playing gives me things to
write about, but writing makes sense of my playing in a way that enriches the
experience.

For Post 100, I recapped the highlights of my first 100
articles. Post 200 was a thank-you to all of my readers for commenting, sharing
their opinions, and making the blog truly interactive. Both of those were fun at the time, but to
the right you can see a list of all my articles broken down by month (on a PC),
and the “thank-you” isn’t something that should be contained to once every hundred
posts. I sincerely thank every one of you. You keep me honest and sane, and you
make up a part of the Eve community I’ve grown to respect and appreciate.

Rather, for this milestone, I wanted to talk a little about
another aspect of the community I appreciate: the other bloggers I read on a
regular basis. These folks all post regularly, present unique perspectives, and
enrich my experience with the game. They wield true power, because they have
the means of helping each of us make sense of what happens around us. So here’s
my must-reads.

This list isn’t comprehensive, and I read a lot of other
blogs than those I mention. But, I do want to give special mention to those
blogs who I believe readers can learn something from – either through the
direct words or the infectiousness of the passion within the words written.

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

On January 12, 2009, Talvorian Dex stepped out of surgery
and began his life as an immortal capsuleer. Back them, I knew nothing about
the game, only that my brother-in-law loved flying an interceptor. I didn’t want to travel too far from my home
system for fear that I wouldn’t have enough “fuel” (capacitor) for the return
trip.

I didn’t know capacitor recharged. I didn’t know anything
about null-sec and was generally leery of PvP as a whole. My only MMO
experience was some Lineage II, where twitch reflexes and overwhelming alpha
strike were the recipe for victory.

I was as green as any newbie, and asking all the same
questions. And I stopped playing for
more than two years.

My real life in Eve started around early March 2011, when my
last continuous subscription run began. I dedicated myself to becoming a
capable solo PvPer. I faced my crisis point when I faced loss after frustrating
loss, and began to wonder whether I had it in me to do it well. I knew nothing
about fight selection or the tempo of an engagement. I was ignorant – without
knowledge.

But I did have a drive to learn, and a willingness to look
at my decisions, actions, and preconceptions.
I was willing to change and become better. And today, while I don’t know everything, I
know more than I did back then.

I had a lot of help from the community, from bloggers, and
from corpmates. In the process, I made friends and learned that while I’m not
anything particularly special, in that ordinariness was something worth writing
about – the daily struggle to meet this challenge and try to do better the next
time, to never think I had “made it”, to never stop assessing whether I’m doing
the right thing.

Monday, January 11, 2016

I get it, I really do. When you’re in the habit of ratting
and are trying to earn your fortune, every little bit helps. Ratting bounties
are nice, and are a good way to make ends meet. Particularly when you’re a part
of an alliance that taxes ratting bounties by 10 or 15%, it’s easy to view
salvage as a way to augment that revenue. So, you bring some MTUs and drop them
in anoms to pick up after yourself. You may bring 5 or so, then pick them all
up in a Noctis when you’re done as you salvage. It can earn you some decent
additional isk.

Only, the dirty little secret is that in the isk/hr game,
salvage and loot isn’t going to help your cause. When it comes right down to
it, that MTU is a liability. Recovering that MTU and salvaging represents a cost
in time that crowds out your best isk-generating option, killing those rats.
Even if you use a second account, you’re better off using a second combat
account, and leaving the loot.

Saturday, January 9, 2016

You folks may have noticed that, over the past few days,
I’ve not written very much. Well, as is no real surprise to anyone at this
point, TISHU has been having a lot of fun causing mayhem in Fade. We’re
hotdropping with black ops battleships. We’re using a copious amount of
dictors. We’re catching folks with anything cloaky.

One thing we definitely are not doing is trying to be fair.
We’re looking for scalps, and fairness isn’t in the cards.

This has been a delightful diversion, and I’ve been racking
up some kills, too. I made my way down in my ratter hunter, with the intention
of flying it until I lost it; so far, I’m still rolling.

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Sugar Kyle recently wrote a post about a quiet decision she
made a year ago to eschew PvP.
Within it, she explained that she stopped PvPing because she was confronted by
someone during her second CSM run who argued that she was inactive because she
had nothing on her killboard. In response, she decided to walk away from PvP
for two reasons: first to spite the person who was trying to judge her by her
killboard, and secondly as a challenge to herself to bring value without
PvPing.

Now, let’s first talk about the idiocy of someone arguing
that a person is inactive because their killboard is empty. Absence of proof is
not proof of absence, and an empty killboard says nothing about a person’s
level of activity, only the number of people they’ve killed or been killed by.
Sugar never passed herself off as a PvP expert or exclusively a PvP candidate.

I was called out by Gevlon recently in an attempt to say
that my killboard somehow discredited me as a legitimate voice about PvP. It was a silly argument easily overcome
(alts, limited time to play, preference for non-bulk PvP, preference against
linked or scouted multi-boxing, etc.).

I found her experience was an interesting case study, not
for her level of PvP activity nor the foolishness of Eve players.

Saturday, January 2, 2016

Every game has its own culture, and a part of that culture is being able to understand what's going to happen based on the current conditions. It's not something you can read up on and understand. It's a sense you get from thoroughly understanding your environment, the mindset of the players around you, and the mechanics, capabilities, and rules of logic of the various constructs within the game.

The tricky part of all this is that most of us accomplish all this naturally over time. We don't even think about it. One day, it just "clicks" and we understand the flow of the game enough that we can anticipate what's going to happen. "That's bait; I'm going to avoid that fight," or "This is a hot-drop situation," are overall senses about which we can't point to a single piece of data. They're deductive conclusions that we arrive at after assimilating and processing a wide range of information.

One of the interesting parts of this, for me, is that this process is identical within Eve as in the real world. When driving, a veteran driver is better able to predict and exploit the flow of traffic to change lanes, and we're always better at making good time during our rush hour commute than other roads, since we know the "flow" - where people are always log-jammed when coming onto the main road, where the left lane moves faster, and where you may need to push the person in front of you a little bit to make that long light.

In Eve, these kinds of insights are difficult for a newbie to attain. They require you to be familiar with a wide range of flying situations, the overarching fitting theories prevalent at the time, and the way various ships actually work in combat. That means getting out there and trying new things. The old saying is, "To learn PvP, fit up 100 frigates and lose all of them."

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